Personal Blog of Mike Bowden

Well I battled with Adobe Acrobat 8 today and an InDesign form that I had created. Basically trying to come up with a way to get Acrobat to automatically recognize the check boxes and radio buttons that I had setup through InDesign. Needless to say this feature still needs a little work on Adobe’s part. Don’t get me wrong, the Automated Field Recognition feature in Acrobat 8 is freaking outstanding and works 90% of the time. It just gets kinked up on the radio and check boxes.

Well after a few hours of battling, trying this, trying that and a little fist banging, I finally found a solution. Just so everyone knows before hand, my boxes were not inline, this is VERY important. I’ll explain more farther down, but this was one of the things that stumped me big time, so I want to get it out now for those that are looking for it as well.

So the first thing we need to do is place our boxes inline with the text. This is very simple to do if you don’t know what it is or how to do. Simply select your box, copy it and double click a text field. Paste your box “inline” with the text, so it’s in the same box as the text. Once you’ve done that there are a few other things to keep in mind. First, your box can only be a maximum of 2 spaces away from the text that it is associated with, any farther and Acrobat won’t pick up on it. Second, do not think that you can space things apart with dashes, hyphens or periods. Acrobat still has no clue what you’re doing and will ignore them.

Here are the attributes of my boxes.

Size: 0.1875 In X 0.1875 In (I did tinker with different sizes, so this doesn’t matter so much. This was however the smallest I tried.)
Stroke: 0.5 pt (Again, I tried a few different ones. 1 pt doesn’t work, 0.5, 0.75 & 2 were what I tried and they all worked.)
Stroke Alignment: Center (I believe the others will work as well, but you’re talking such a small difference in location you won’t even notice.)

That’s about all I did to mine. On the Yes and No questions, Acrobat seemed to realize that there we’re only two and assumed that one or the other should be selected. Even though they were square, Acrobat set them up as radio buttons. *Good Job Adobe*

The check boxes work, but I’m a little peeved as they aren’t actually checks as if you were to create the boxes through Acrobat, they are simply filled black squares. Wish there was a way to change this, if anyone knows of a way, by all means post a comment and I’ll update this post.

Now I know some of you are asking, why don’t you just do it manually? Well when you have new customer assessment forms that are 20+ pages, it tends to take awhile. Here’s a great example. The first time I created the assessment form, it took me 3 hours to do all the fileds, boxes and radio buttons by hand manually. I had already created everything the way I wanted, laid it out and even put in lines through InDesign, so doing this manually through Acrobat didn’t seem very productive. I had known about the auto recognition field tool in Acrobat 8, but I hadn’t played with it much. So I decided to this morning and figured out how to make things work directly out of InDesign. So I took the 3 hours it took me before, not to mention the 4 hours it took in InDesign and I reduced that down to a whopping 15 minutes in Acrobat. I still had my 4 hours in InDesign, but you can’t get away from that.

If you know what you’re doing, this is an outstanding tool and a GREAT time saver. Don’t get frustrated if it doesn’t work the first time, just tinker with it until you find a solution.